The Chinese word 卢比 (lúbǐ) is a **phonetic loanword** formed through transliteration, specifically designed to approximate the sound of a foreign currency's name. It directly represents "rupee," the monetary unit of India, Pakistan, and other nations, with the characters 卢 (lú) and 比 (bǐ) chosen solely for their pronunciation to mimic the English word "rupee" (or its equivalent in other source languages). This is a standard method in Chinese for adopting foreign proper nouns, especially currency names, where the individual characters carry no semantic relation to money but together create an accepted phonetic label.